Biography
He was born on December 7, 1895 in Chicago, Illinois.
Graduate of the Western Military Academy and University of Chicago where, upon graduation in 1917, he received commission into the United States Army and assigned to the 3rd Infantry Regiment.
Served in a variety of assignments in the US and overseas during World War I, most notably on staff at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. In August 1942, was named assistant division commander of the 99th Infantry Division at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi. In April, 1943, assumed command of the 42nd Infantry Division (the famed Rainbow Division) at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma.
In December 1944, the division arrived in France and played a major role in stopping the last German drive into Western Europe, known as the Battle of the Bulge.
He was credited with the liberating of the Dachau concentration camp at the end of the war. Following V-E Day, the 42nd assumed occupation duty in western Austria, with Collins serving as military governor. In July 1948, he was appointed commander of the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington, and later assumed command of New York-New Jersey area headquarters at Fort Totten, New York.
In January 1951, he was assigned to command the 8th Division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. A year later he got assigned to the office of Military Attache in Moscow, USSR and then back to the US to command the 31st Infantry Division in Camp Atterbury, Indiana.
He retired in 1954 and moved to Salzburg where he was an honorary citizen of Salzburg and Linz, where many Dachau survivors were initially transported after the liberation of the camp, along with his wife Irene Gehmacher, who was Austrian. He died on March 8, 1963 and was buried at the Saint Peter's churchyard cemetery in Salzburg.
Read more about this topic: Harry J. Collins
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)